 Live from the Mendeley Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2016, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors. Now here's your host, John Walls. And welcome back to VMworld as theCUBE continues our coverage here. Week-long coverage it has been started on Monday and finishing up today. We're glad to have you with us here on the live stream as we continue our look at what's happening here at the VMworld get together. Exciting time, show floor, lot of enthusiasm there, lot of invigorated spirit, and we've had a lot of great insight here to share with you at the table. Joining me for the segment, Peter Burris who leads research for Wikibon and Peter, always pleasure to be with you sir. Absolutely John, thank you very much. And we're joined by Aaron Cootie who is a system administrator for Scott Equipment based out of Monroe, Louisiana and Clint Parrish, enterprise IT architect with VSS. Gentlemen, thanks for being with us. Thank you. Tell us a little bit about first off about Scott Equipment, about what y'all do, you know, why you're here and what you do with Scott. Scott Equipment is a large heavy equipment dealership. We range from anywhere from skid steers to articulated trucks to motor graders, backhose, you know, you name it, cranes. We're located in seven states. We have 22 locations and I'm here just pretty much to gain insight that equipment or products that could help move us forward since we are such a small IT department. And you've got a good story too. I'm looking forward to hearing that. By the way, Aaron was saying we asked him how many employees he said 600 when we're soaking wet, which I liked that, that was pretty good. Clint, as far as VSS and your relationship with Scott, fill us in there. We deal a lot of different compute, network, storage environments and Scott has been a customer of one of our sales reps for several years now. So he was contacted by Scott to come back in and help him remediate a problem that they were having and try and update some of the hardware that they were using as their VMware platform. So did you walk into a mess or how big of a headache was it for you and then ultimately what kind of solutions did you wind up adopting to get yourself up to speed and maybe into the 21st century, if you will? Well, we started off with an IBM Blade Center chassis with regular DS 3500 storage. It wasn't overly messy, but the way it was initially set up was a little bit non-business practice. It was just kind of piecemeal together. The equipment had reached its life expectancy about eight years or so. So we decided it was time because we were also looking at potentially changing some software around and changing some applications and we also wanted to make sure that we were prepared to do that in the future when we were ready to do that. So we reached out to our account manager and said, hey, we need help planning a solution that we can not only start where we are but grow to where we need to be, which we're still in the growing phase. We're gonna be in the growing phase for probably the next couple of years, but he came up with the VersaStack, the IBM VersaStack. So it sits on a Cisco UCS and we're using a V5000 storage cabinet. So what were your specific needs that you said to get where we need to be? What was it exactly that you were trying to address in terms of competitiveness? What did you feel like you had to do to maybe get ahead of the pack in your space? Well, we had in our area with the construction equipment rentals, most of the people are just still paper pushers. Most of our competitors, they still just do everything by hand, but we wanted to sit there and say, hey, look, we're coming into the 21st century and we're gonna give you the opportunity to do online business, to allow our technicians to do online tickets, you know, have instant gratification for the customer for the most part. That was our goal is to make sure our customers were instantly gratified. So in doing that, we had to scale our environment. We were already outgrowing our current storage array. So we had to go with something that allowed us to be flexible enough to extend what we already had but grow what we needed later on. So that's what VSS helped us achieve. Now, you're not a big shop, five people. Right. 600 folks being served by five IT folks. So you weren't looking for a whole bunch of hardware with a whole bunch of administrative requirements to serve the business as a group. Correct. So how is some of the VersaStack and some of the other things facilitating the productivity of your guys as you deliver the business, what the business needs from a data and IT perspective? The VersaStack is allowing us to just pretty much let VMware do what VMware does. I mean, we don't have to babysit it 24 seven. It, it lets, it babysits itself and then relays the information back. That's the biggest thing. Cause before with the IBM Chassis, it did some, but we were, we were having to make sure we monitored it constantly, especially with storage and CPU. We were always having to move VMs around to accommodate, you know, some performance issues on one host or one data store or whatnot. Now we hear a lot about how some of the heavy equipment manufacturers, the folks at your, whose products you're moving, are themselves starting to use IoT and related technologies to increase the performance and productivity through instrumentation directly on the vehicles themselves. I'm sure your reps and your guys are familiar with that. Are you actually yourself starting to plug into those back planes to help with service and help with maintenance? We have, we have talked about doing that. Currently, for example, Volvo, who's our, one of our biggest brands, they, they have a product called CareTrack. It's a GPS module that's inside the machine that brings up all the issues that go on with that machine, them hours, fault codes, whatever we need to know with that machine. And that's all tied back to their, their systems in Sweden. And then Kabelko and all them have their own flavor. But we've thought about putting our own flavor in to try to do some sort of preventive maintenance on our schedules. Right, there you go. So that's, so as even at a 600 person moving heavy equipment, five person IT shop, you're looking for that platform that can help you start to enhance your customer service through digital technologies. What kind of timetable are you looking at? Year, two year, five years? This is probably, being that we are such a small shop, it's hard to get start stuff going because, you know, obviously we have the day-to-days phone calls and I can't print or whatever that comes up. But when we do get the ball rolling, we try to roll it out fast. That way we don't have to delay anything. But we are probably on a five year look to get where we need to be on a lot of things. And hopefully Volvo and some of those other suppliers will also make it easier for you to tap into their systems. They use, yeah, right now they're doing a, Volvo is a great example. They're doing a systems change on their parts application that already has an API with our current system. Well, we're fixing to upgrade to the newest release in less than a month. But on that newest release, Volvo hasn't created a new plugin yet for their parts interface that they're going to in less than a week, maybe two weeks. So we're working with them and some of the other dealers that have our software to help pay for them to develop this interface. So it goes in directly with our ERP software. So Clint, your side of this. Obviously, Scott came to you, so we got a problem. We've got a lot of legacy stuff here and we got to speed up and get going here. You have to make evaluations based on their capabilities and they're like manpower. We've talked about that. Exactly. You might want to sell them all kinds of bells and whistles, but the fact is there's only so much they can use. So how do you make that judgment? How did you make that judgment? And then where do you think there are, in terms of that five year rollout that they've got underway? So I have to credit our account representative, Dwight Manning, who works with Aaron directly. He's been in the business a long, long time and understands what type of business Scott is in and what Aaron's environment is and is limited IT staff with five people and so forth. So part of our job is to build the best plan that we can and to help them remediate their current problems. Because when you're going to adopt a new technology like a Cisco versus stack and IBM storage and so forth, you really need to get all your ducks in a row before you start ramping up this new technology to be able to take advantage of it. So getting all the remediation, getting the systems up to date, the OS is patched, all that kind of stuff and getting the network configured properly, secure everything and then moving over to the new technology. And then finally, after the execution of all this plan, giving enough hands-on training to Aaron and his guys to be able to work with the product, manage the product and do day-to-day operations. That's really what our focus is. But you're also, I presume, you're also helping remediate the current problem, but in a way that anticipates the future needs of Scott. Absolutely. How is VMware and some of the other technologies, I mean you guys have been walking the floor here, how are these technologies making it easier for you to make it easier for Scott? Right. To set up the right infrastructure so that the business comes back and call Scott a hero. You know, virtualization, that's one of the things that it's brought to the table is the fact that you can have test systems and virtualize a working production system, go off and play with it, test it. You know, if you run into a problem, roll it back, redo things, get it all right, and then moved into production seamlessly. You know, that's one of the very powerful statements that virtualization makes for you. And of course VMware is at the very, you know, concept of that came when VMware started to be real popular. So for us to be able to model and, you know, test patches and upgrades, all that kind of stuff, under a virtualized environment where you can actually make mistakes and then go back and fix it real easy, made it very, very simple. You know, and Aaron, you're not only making this transition in terms of hardware and software, but also physically, right? You're moving this, if I'm correct, 500 miles away. Yes, and which brings a whole different dimension to that that all of a sudden it's, all this is not reciting where it used to. Right, beforehand we just had the, basically the corporate office in Monroe, Louisiana. We just had a larger office area that they converted into a server room. You know, we had four racks and had blade centers, rack switches and other little servers. When my boss got there, he was able to take majority of the rack switches and get them virtualized. So he convert them all from stand-alones to VMs. And then we took the next process after that, this year, last year, and got the VersaStack, took it to Nashville, co-load, and then migrated everything over there. The savings that we had with the VersaStack versus what we had at the office actually paid for the colo. So we kind of washed all the expenses out, which worked out great for us because now we have redundant data, power, cooling. I mean, beforehand we just had one UPS and it's gone down. I mean, we had a component that wasn't supposed to break, break and brought us hard down for six to eight hours, which luckily we were able to recover, we didn't lose a lot of money, but it was still a panic situation. Now with the VersaStack and the cost savings, we were able to colo-locate and essentially eliminate that issue. I think this is a great example. This is why I love talking about case studies, is that we talked so much here this week about Enterprise and Fortune 100 and Fortune 500, but companies of all shapes and sizes, making this IT transition, and it's a, you're a pretty good role model, I think, for a lot of companies in your space that it can be done smartly and shrewdly with cost efficiency in mind. So thanks for sharing the story. Thanks for being here with us. Thank you. And we wish you a great end of show and I'm sure it's been a great experience for you as well. Good deal. Thank you gentlemen for being with us. Back with more here from VMworld on theCUBE right after this.